The communist manifesto was not a widely publicized text during his lifetime. Only posthumously was an attempt to create Marxism made.
Despite how popular it is, it’s not his most important text.
The 1848 series of revolutions that Marx witnessed was the first time the working class were the protagonists of said revolutions.
The French revolution brought the “progressive bourgeoisie” - they advocated for freedom of the press, freedom of association, democracy, etc. But after 1848, the bougies got scared, because yes.
Thus, the bourgeois become increasingly conservative after this point. They start making compromises with the ruling class.
After the revolutions fail, all of the revolutionaries moved to the UK, because it was more liberal.
Marx was basically a nobody during his lifetime.
The idea behind Capital was huge - and Marx couldn’t complete it during his lifetime. What we now know as “Das Kapital” is just Volumes 1 through 3 (out of the 6 (?) he had planned).
“Mode of production” is a key concept throughout Mark’s work.
- Production here should be understood in the broadest sense of the word
- social relations (as production)
- reproduction (producing the things that make sure production can go on, humans included)
Marx developed notions of natural and social relationships in “the production of life”.
The metabolism associated with the natural aspect was noticed through the fact that the food grown in the countryside, shipped to the city, and then, for example, thrown into the river, causes a crisis wherein the soil is impoverished, the river is polluted, and the metabolic cycle is broken - what he calls the “metabolic rift”.
Thus, social relations cause agricultural and other crises, but instead of fixing it societally, British capitalist society goes buying guano and digging up bones from old battlefields to use for fertilizer. Instead of fixing the problem they just reproduced it on a larger scale while applying temporary patches, kicking the can further down the road.
we live in a society mfw
marx basically says we need to consider beings and things in their respective contexts, and that they don’t really have any meaning otherwise
i.e. a slave is only socially defined as a slave, there is nothing about that person that inherently makes them a slave outside society
MP (mode of production) is a complex set of relations.
The increased socialization of labor - making an item of clothing, tech, anything no longer is done by one or a few artisans, instead requiring thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of different workers. Marx says this might create struggles and tensions, due to the social process of production not corresponding with the social appropriation of the produced items. These tensions are resolved via the seizing of the means of production